ICT

Go Girl - Cyber Edition

Go Girl, Go for IT is a program run by the Victorian ICT for Women network whose aims are to encourage more women into the world of ICT.

In the past, the organisation has hosted a day at the Burwood campus of Deakin University and many McKinnon students have experienced a fun and stimulating day out at this event. This year, however, things are a bit different as we all know! Go Girls is hosting a Cyber Edition of the event which will run on Tuesday 13 October. Students will be able to interactively take part online either at home or at school.

The day has been split into two main sessions: 9 am to 12 pm for Year 7 and 8 students and 1 pm to 4 pm for Years 10 to 12. Keep an eye on Compass to find out how to sign up for this event.

Year 11s Learning the Skills of the Future

Throughout this pandemic, the politicians and health experts have been talking about data and its importance in planning how to manage a world with COVID. Earlier in the year, the Year 11 students had to complete a project that involved creating a Data Visualisation. It was decided that the students would learn how to use software called Tableau which claims to be “the most powerful, secure and flexible end-to-end analytics platform.”

On visiting the DHHS website recently, it was interesting and encouraging to see the various data visualisations for Victoria all being created using Tableau. From a teacher’s perspective, it is good to know that we are teaching the students skills that they can use in the outside world.

The World Economic Forum listed ‘data analyst’ as being one of the most in-demand jobs of the 2020s. For anyone interested in seeing what the Victorian data looks like, click on the link here.

Innovative Solutions

The new study design for Year 11 Applied Computing came in at the start of the year. As part of this new study design, for one of the SACs students had to collaboratively analyse, design, develop and evaluate an innovative solution. The classes spent several lessons looking at a wide variety of emerging technologies such as drones, Augmented and Virtual Reality, 3D printers, Blockchain and Wearable Technology.

My initial thoughts were that this was going to be a real challenge for students to come up with ideas of their own but the various groups have risen to that challenge and identified some innovative solutions for the future. Of particular interest were the ideas from Nam Tran, Amanda Wu and Michael Yang in producing a school attendance app that students would manage themselves and the group of Rose McCallum, Joe Stone, Niveda Beepat and Kevin Yu who came up with the idea of a Virtual School Tour. Maybe these are ideas that they could take to Mrs Binnion!

Realistically and given the current climate, it has not been possible for students to take their ideas to the production stage. Rather, they have developed a proof of concept and their task is to show that this would be a viable project.

Perhaps we might see some of them on the Shark Tank in the years to come! Below are the initial designs for the Attendance App and the Sign in page for the McKinnon Virtual School Tour: